Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Welcome to Everytown - A Brexit Comment

Julian Baggini has written an original work, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (2007).  Formally trained with a doctorate in philosophy, he chose to set up shop for six months in Rotherham, Yorkshire, judged by him as the typical community in England by virtue of its postal code, in order to live in immersion among its residents (many of whom he later identifies as friends). On a steady diet of the two main tabloids (Daily Mail and Sun), he finds England’s core culture to be fundamentally working class, whose game is football - not cricket (no surprise here), and where “tolerance” of different minorities is considered the only option available.[1]

Baggini (who was born in England to an Italian father) already thinks of himself as an outsider, and he gets to the heart of English difficulties with multiculturalism in his excellent chapter “Culture Shocks,” important reading if one wants to understand the mind of the typical Brexit voter.  My only concern (as the author readily admits) is that he might be accused of being an “apologist” for the intolerance he encounters.[2]
 
The next chapter, “Illiberal Democrats” looks at Rotherham’s communitarianism (the most polysyllabic word you will find in the book) which, as the author simplifies, is a philosophic anti-abstraction combining attenuated rights with local responsibilities.[3]  If this definition is still unclear to the reader, allow Baggini’s discussion of the remainder of his stay in Rotherham to convey an underappreciated way of political thinking in England - often considered the fountainhead of liberalism instead because of its so-called traditional freedoms.

There is much more wonderful analysis of working life available to the everyday reader in Welcome to Everytown, including chapters on gambling, holidaymaking, and the proverbial English pub.  Overall it seems reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) which, as that novel’s title suggests, depicted the social differences between the gentrified South and commercialized North in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
 
Given England’s past “greatness” – memories of Empire, and all that - one might see its current Brexit predicament as the culmination of the logic of postcolonialism, as Scotland and Northern Ireland now might have motive to leave the United Kingdom.  How could such blundering come to pass?  One might begin modestly by peering into the minds of Englishmen north of the metropolis of London, as Baginni so eloquently does in the microcosm of Rotherham, well before the fact.



[1] Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (London: Granta Books, 2008), p.72.
[2] Ibid., p. 57.
[3] Ibid., p. 83.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

Justin Trudeau’s mid-life crisis: Dante's view


When I had journeyed half our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
the savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter – death is hardly more severe!


Dante, Inferno (circa. 1300 AD)[1]





[1] See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, tr. Maurice Mandelbaum (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 1995), p. 59.  There are three Cantos to The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Friday, March 1, 2019

Jody Wilson-Raybould through the prism of post-colonialism

The fact that Jody Wilson-Raybould was appointed to the cabinet in 2015 as Canada’s first female indigenous Justice Minister and attorney-general can be seen as a genuine post-colonial expression by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The logic of post-colonialism continued, however, after she resigned from cabinet and then ‘spoke her truth’ to the House of Commons justice committee last Wednesday, where she alleges – in great detail - improper pressure over many months by officials in the PMO, and others, including the Prime Minister, to come up with a settlement with SNC-Lavalin.  The engineering giant based in Montreal is accused of bribing (to the tune of almost $50 million) members of the Gadhafi family in Libya to secure lucrative multibillion dollar contracts over 10 years beginning in 2001. The Liberal government had altered the Criminal Code in order to allow for deferred prosecution agreements, where it was considered possible for SNC-Lavalin to avoid a trial, by admitting it was at fault and accepting a fine.

Instead of viewing the multinational corporation as a major source of jobs, employing some 50,000 people around the world (almost 4,000 of which are based in Quebec, with another remaining 5,000 throughout the rest of Canada), the former attorney-general made up her mind’ and applied the rule of law available to her.  In other words, she decided not to interfere in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin’s alleged criminal - that is, colonial - activities in North Africa.  It was easy for her to see it this way  - and not cut a deal, given her background as an indigenous woman, who ‘speaks truth to power’, raised and educated in British Columbia, far from the centre of power in Ottawa and far from the ‘Laurentian Consensus’ – the cultural identity of Canada’s traditional political elite drawn to the St. Lawrence River watershed in Ontario and Quebec.[1]  She was also a prosecutor in Vancouver’s downtown east side – one of the poorest postal codes in the country, home to drug addicts, the mentally ill and Indigenous peoples, all on skid row.

Canada is a difficult country to govern, and I don’t envy any prime minister, as there are many different competing regions, cultures and interests in this broad land.  Reaching a deal with SNC-Lavalin was likely guided by Liberal government notions of seeking compromise – as opposed to lousy ethics (or criminal activity) - of ‘politics as the art of the possible’, as the realist and nation-builder Bismarck put it.  Instead, following Jody Wilson-Raybould’s meticulous testimony, any compromise is now likely beyond reach. We are now entering the realm of politics of ‘the impossible’, as Vaclav Havel put it in a different context, and he would have admired Jody Wilson-Raybould, whose heightened ethical courage has inflamed the imagination of many Canadians agreeing with the attorney-general’s testimony. 

Trudeau is stumbling because he dared to do something different by appointing Jody Wilson-Raybould in the first place.  She appeared ideal to the Liberal brand in the era of postcolonial Truth and Reconciliation, and now he has fallen short because of raised expectations, undermining his own public credibility.

Despite our many collective tragedies, notably regarding the First Nations’ peoples and colonial law, residential schools and the like, Canada is an ethically rich country today. Idealism abounds, perhaps to a fault, and lawyers will parse Jody Wilson-Raybould’s words for more troubling signs of political interference with an attorney-general shaped by her roots, who had a unique role to play in our legal system. Expect more news headlines further dismaying the everyday voter already well aware of the paucity of choice.




[1] John Ibbitson, “’Laurentian Consensus’ permeates Trudeau’s latest bungling,” The Globe and Mail (Friday March1, 2019), p.A9.  Ibbitson misses the postcolonial context.